Confessions of an Aca-Fan

Today, I am using my blog space to share announcements of two upcoming events which may be of interest to some of my readers
Transmedia Lab Competition at RioContentMarket 2013

The Transmedia Lab is one of the activities of the RioContentMarket, an international event on multiplatform content production open to the audiovisual and digital media industry. The Transmedia Lab aims to promote professional training and project improvement.

In the last edition of RioContentMarket, in 2012, more than 100 projects from all of Latin America were submitted and 12 transmedia projects were selected to participate in the Transmedia Lab, which lasted 4 days. The project’s authors and representatives consulted with market experts; were presented in pitching sessions to buyers, co-producers and television channels; and participated in meetings with domestic and international market players.

Besides creating opportunities for all participating projects, three awards were given and chosen by three different groups of judges:

In the 2013 edition of RioContentMarket, the Transmedia Lab will focus on transmedia projects for TV series and 30 projects will be selected: 10 international and 20 Brazilian projects. The Transmedia Lab - Series will be held from February 17 through 22, 2013 in two steps (I) Capacitating from February 17th to 19th, and (II)Pitching and Panels, February 20th to 22nd. The Capacitating step will be held following the training of the projects’ authors for pitching and the scheduling of meetings between consultants and creative producers of the selected projects. The Pitching and Panels will be held during the RioContentMarket 2013 with keynotes and panels related to transmedia topics and pitching projects for industry and market professionals.

The Transmedia Lab objectives for 2013 are:

· enhance television series narratives, through specialized consulting with market experts;

· improve the transmedia projects for television series to qualify them for the audiovisual market nationally and internationally;

Submissions accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 1, 2013 (evaluations begin in November). Please see the end of this call for papers for submission instructions.

The distinction between public and private – where the line is drawn and how it is sometimes inverted, the ways that it is embraced or contested – says much about a culture. Media have been used to enable, define and police the shifting line between the two, so it is not surprising that the history of media change to some extent maps the history of these domains. Media in Transition 8 takes up the question of the shifting nature of the public and private at a moment of unparalleled connectivity, enabling new notions of the socially mediated public and unequalled levels of data extraction thanks to the quiet demands of our Kindles, iPhones, televisions and computers. While this forces us to think in new ways about these long established categories, in fact the underlying concerns are rooted in deep historical practice. MiT8 considers the ways in which specific media challenge or reinforce certain notions of the public or the private and especially the ways in which specific “texts” dramatize or imagine the public, the private and the boundary between them. It takes as its foci three broad domains: personal identity, the civic (the public sphere) and intellectual property.

Reality television and confessional journalism have done much to invert the relations between private and public. But the borders have long been malleable. Historically, we know that camera-armed Kodakers and telephone party lines threatened the status quo of the private; that the media were complicit in keeping from the public FDR’s disability and the foibles of the ruling elite; and that paparazzi and celebrities are strategically intertwined in the game of publicity. How have the various media played these roles (and represented them), and how is the issue changing at a moment when most of our mediated transactions leave data traces that not only redefine the borders of the private, but that serve as commodities in their own right?

The public, too, is a contested space. Edmund Burke’s late 18th century invocation of the fourth estate linked information flow and political order, anticipating aspects of Habermas’s public sphere. From this perspective, trends such as a siege on public service broadcasting, a press in decline, and media fragmentation on the rise, all ring alarm bells. Yet WikiLeaks and innovative civic uses of media suggest a sharp countertrend. What are the fault lines in this struggle? How have they been represented in media texts, enacted through participants and given form in media policy? And what are we to make of the fate of a public culture in a world whose media representations are increasingly on-demand, personalized and algorithmically-designed to please?

Finally, MiT8 is also concerned with the private-public rift that appears most frequently in struggles over intellectual property (IP). Ever-longer terms of IP protection combined with a shift from media artifacts (like paper books) to services (like e-journals) threaten long-standing practices such as book lending (libraries) and raise thorny questions about cultural access. Social media sites, powered by users, often remain the private property of corporations, akin to the public square’s replacement by the mall, and once-public media texts, like certain photographic and film collections, have been re-privatized by an array of institutions. These undulations in the private and public have implications for our texts (remix culture), our access to them, and our activities as audiences; but they also have a rich history of contestation, evidenced in the copybook and scrapbook, compilation film, popular song and the open source and creative commons movement.

MiT8 encourages a broad approach to these issues, with specific attention to textual practice, users, policy and cultural implications. As usual, we encourage work from across media forms and across historical periods and cultural regions.

Possible topics include:

Media traces: cookies, GPS data, TiVo and Kindle tracking

The paradoxes of celebrity and the public persona

Representing the anxieties of the private in film, tv, literature

MMORPGs / identities / virtual publics

The spatial turn in media: private consumption in public places

Historical media panics regarding the private-public divide

When cookies shape content, what happens to the public?

Creative commons and the new public sphere

Big data and privacy

Party lines and two-way radio: amplifying the private

The fate of public libraries in the era of digital services

Methodologies of internet and privacy studies

Creative commons, free software, and the new public sphere

Public and civic WiFi access to the internet

Surveillance, monitoring and their (dis)contents

Submit an Abstract and Short Bio
Short abstracts for papers should be about 250 words in a PDF or Word format and should be sent as email attachments to mit8@mit.edu no later than Friday, March 1, 2013. Please include a short (75 words or fewer) biographical statement.

We will be evaluating submissions on a rolling basis beginning in November and will respond to every proposal.

Include a Short Bibliography
For this year’s conference, we recommend that you include a brief bibliography of no more than one page in length with your abstract and bio.

Proposals for Full Panels
Proposals for full panels of three or four speakers should include a panel title and separate abstracts and bios for each speaker. Anyone proposing a full panel should recruit a moderator.

Submit a Full Paper
In order to be considered for inclusion in a conference anthology, you must submit a full version of your paper prior to the beginning of the conference.

If you have any questions about the eighth Media in Transition conference, please contact Brad Seawell at seawell@mit.edu.